Languages of India

Indian Languages

Tamil

Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamils in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore where it has an official status; with significant minorities in Malaysia, Mauritius, and Réunion, and emigrant communities around the world. It is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, classical language in India, and has official status in India , Sri Lanka and Singapore. With more than 77 million speakers, Tamil is one of the widely spoken languages in the world.

Tamil has a literary tradition of over two thousand years. The earliest
epigraphic records found date to around 300 BC and the Tolka-ppiyam , oldest
known treatise in Tamil, has been dated variously between second century
BC and tenth century AD. Tamil was declared a classical language of India
by the Government of India in 2004 and was the first Indian language to
have been accorded the status.

Tamil employs agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to mark noun
class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. Unlike
other Dravidian languages, the metalanguage of Tamil, the language used
to describe the technical linguistic terms of the language and its structure,
is also Tamil (rather than Sanskrit).According to a 2001 survey, there were
1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.

History

Tamil is one of the ancient languages of the world with a 2200 year
history. The origins of Tamil are not transparent, but it developed and
flourished in India as an independent language with a rich literature. More
than 55% of the epigraphical inscriptions, about 55,000, found by the Archaeological
Survey of India in India are in Tamil language Unlike the neighbouring Karnataka
and Andhra Pradesh where early inscriptions were written in Sanskrit, the
early inscriptions in Tamil Nadu used Tamil exclusively. Tamil has the oldest
extant literature amongst the Dravidian languages, but dating the language
and the literature precisely is difficult. Literary works in India were
preserved either in palm leaf manuscripts (implying repeated copying and
recopying) or through oral transmission, making direct dating impossible.
External chronological records and internal linguistic evidence, however,
indicate that the oldest extant works were probably compiled sometime between
the 2nd century BC and the 10th century AD.

Epigraphic attestation of Tamil begins with rock inscriptions from the 2nd century BC, written in Tamil-Brahmi, an adapted form of the Brahmi script. The earliest extant literary text is the Tolka-ppiyam, a work on poetics and grammar which describes the language of the classical period, dated variously between the 1st BC and tenth